Comments on: Are Intranets stagnating?

By: Segnalazioni nutrienti | Intranet Management

Segnalazioni nutrienti | Intranet Management — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:48:52 +0000

[...] Le intranet sono stagnanti? Se lo chiede Shiv Singh. [...]

By: Shiv Singh

Shiv Singh — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:40:24 +0000

Thank you for the thoughts. There are certainly some issues with the term intranet but its still the one that’s most commonly used in organizations. I don’t know the small business intranet space as well as I know the big corporation intranets. I’d have thought that we’d see more innovation there leveraging software as a service solutions but maybe not.

I agree the intranet isn’t really the workspace anymore and that’s one of its problems. I think another factor is where the intranet team sits in an organization. Its usually in the IT departments who focus heavily on the technology or the platform specifically. Wiki driven intranets and those with desktop gadget elements are starting to change things.

By: Dorothy Mead

Dorothy Mead — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:49:47 +0000

I sat in on this event and had the same takeaway – lots of nice stuff but really just the same stuff as before with a few more bells and whistles – and that’s not to put down the immense work that’s gone into the development. The two things I’m left pondering are whether it’s time to develop a new term – just say intranet and you’re back in the nineties when we wanted to show the difference between the external company web site and the employee info only area; and secondly whether the crux of it is that the intranet is still a destination to visit – it’s not the real workspace for employees. I think wikis are popular because you ‘live in them’ more; if we could bring this feel to all the functions we need for collaboration (from accessing the ‘old’ static information that still has some value to the newer interactive tools of the web 2.0 world) then the newwordforintranet will move to the next step.

By: Matthew Hodgson

Matthew Hodgson — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:09:24 +0000

CIOs no longer see the intranet as a strategic resource, but little more than an electronic filing cabinet. As a result, we see little investment in them these days. If they are to truly serve as information and knowledge centres (as is often the intention) then they need to be better linked to people and knowledge strategies. M

By: Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:34:34 +0000

Intranets, yes. But then they always have after the fashion of all things designed from the top-down. But our jungle of an organizational wiki is thriving, thank you very much!

By: Anita Campbell

Anita Campbell — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:41:20 +0000

Shiv, one area where I think intranets have been stagnating for sure, is Intranets designed specifically for small businesses. About 6 months ago I started looking around for SaaS Intranets and just got frustrated. many are scaled too big or too complex for a small organization of a couple people. What I ended up doing was cobbling together something from Start page applications.

Perhaps you can do an article some day reviewing a few scaled-down Intranet applications specifically for organizations with under 10 employees.

By: James Dellow

James Dellow — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:28:19 +0000

I agree, as you say, that we’re maybe too focused on a traditional definition of the intranet. But the issue of stagnating intranets isn’t new. Some organisations have simply been progressing faster than others over the last 10 to 15 years or so, and I’m sure this will continue to be the case. Blogs, wikis, and other social media tools will only be transformative if they are used in a transformative way. The chances are that in a few years time I’m sure well see books, conferences, training course and consultants all offering ways to “refresh your wiki”.